Arlington husband-and-wife team Jeff Allen and Roshni Agarwal have vacation planning almost down to a science.
They pick a time when it's feasible for them to travel—late November? Early June?—and pick a place based on flight deals or hotel specials. So instead of going to Cancun in the middle of summer, you'll find them in Patagonia in January.
It became so fun for them that their friends started to take notice. One-by-one, they started approaching the duo for travel tips. They'd say something like, "If we give you a time and price range, can you help us pick a destination?"
"What we were finding is that we were always researching our next trip or planning something, and we didn't have time to actually go on all of the trips that we wanted to plan, so we started planning trips for friends and family," Allen told DC Inno in an interview.
Now, Allen and Agarwal are turning their finely tuned skills into a blossoming side hustle called The Vacation Hunt.
Through The Vacation Hunt, the couple plans surprise trips for you and a group, starting at $750 for two nights, per person for destinations in the U.S. International trips for groups start at $1,200 for three nights, per person. Prices include flights, accommodations, a customized list of daily activities for you and your group and 2-3 clues that will be sent to the group ahead of the trip about the destination selected.
When booking, guests fill out a questionnaire asking where the group has been that they really loved, where the group didn't like traveling to or where they go to all the time (If you have family in Portland, they don't want to accidentally send you there, for instance), and also what kind of vacations they like (chill, beach days or adventurous rock-climbing?).
Once the booking is submitted, Allen and Agarwal get to work. They find a location based on what you love and start prepping clues to send to the team a few weeks ahead of the trip. Exactly one week before the scheduled trip, The Vacation Hunt reveals your destination.
"Everyone always think 'I want to go to Cancun, I want to go to Jamaica,'" Allen said. "It's an opportunity for us to suggest a place based on what's on sale and based on wherever you wouldn't think to go."
One example is a surprise birthday party in Seattle that the couple planned for a group of close friends. A friend's husband was turning 30, and she wanted to do something fun for him. Her husband knew he would be going out of town on a specific day, but he didn't know where to until a week before the trip.
With the company only a month old, Allen says that most of their clients have been people who they're friends with, who they work with or who they know on Facebook. But already, they've planned three surprise trips, and several more traditional trips.
Surprise trips aren't the only option The Vacation Hunt offers, though. Allen says he understands that people might not trust strangers to plan a surprise for them, so they also offer basic trip planning services, too, for $150 per person simply for the labor. The price doesn't include the cost of the trip, but the couple will help you pick a destination or come up with a itinerary for your trip based on the budget you have in mind.
"It's a lower commitment so people can tell us a destination and set their budget, and they're not committing that $750 to us upfront, which is a bit intimidating without an established reputation," Allen said.
Moving forward, they want to get to a place they can take on the business full-time—possibly planning trips while they're on the road full-time themselves. But, for now, they're focusing on the next goal: creating a honeymoon specific package.
"Before this, we never ran our own business before," Allen said.
"Right now, we're only doing this part-time, we still have full-time jobs that fill our days. We'd like to get to the point where we can do this full-time, and it would open us up to go on the road ourselves and do the job anywhere with free wifi."
Images courtesy of The Vacation Hunt.
